Brooklyn Today for Jan. 19

Brooklyn Today for Jan. 19

Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Good morning. Today is the 19th day of the year. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of Jan. 19, 1902, carried an item from Abraham & Straus (now Macy’s on the Fulton Street Mall) saying that the department store was in the midst of rearranging its elevator service so that some elevators stopped only when going up, others only when going down. This plan obviously didn’t last. In 1902, elevators were still fairly rare, and only big department stores (like A&S) and ultra-luxurious apartment houses, like the ones on Central Park West, had them. A law saying that every elevator had to have an operator wouldn’t be repealed until 1920.